Here’s what happens to your product reviews on Amazon
In our everyday work at FeedCheck where we help brands manage reviews for tens of thousands of products, there were not few the cases in which some of our customers were anxiously asking us why their reviews numbers were different in FeedCheck than the numbers shown on Amazon.
They found that utterly strange and wanted to understand why and how that discrepancy was even possible. Who wouldn’t when reviews have an increasing influence in assisting us during our online (often offline too) purchases and when one pays for a service to get most out of their reviews data which suddenly confuses them.
Well no, it was not our platform that tracked the data wrong!
Let me share with you two interesting things I’ve got to find out from my discussions – one with my friend Dave and another one with a representative of an Amazon sellers community.
A few days ago, I and Dave were talking about how we look at reviews when we buy products online, especially electronic products. He told me that he never trusts the products that display only 5 stars reviews as that would be odd for a product to be equally appreciated by a large poll of customers. Reviews are not only and always about a product quality within its category. Besides many other product specific features like value for money, weight, softness etc., reviews are also about how different consumers with different lifestyles and needs had experienced a product in their own particular context.
Therefore, there are no perfect products for any single occasion. Like Dave, there are other people who think the same when they go online to purchase a product. And Amazon is aware of that too! Let’s keep this in mind for a bit later.
Yesterday while talking to a representative of an Amazon seller community, which also happened to be a big seller on Amazon, he raised the following question: “ How could I identify and track the deleted reviews on Amazon?”
What? Reviews are deleted from Amazon? Who deletes them?
Then he continued to tell me that a vast majority of Amazon sellers buy reviews and they’re always 5 stars reviews. Of course, who would buy anything less than that when they want their product to get a favorable position online against its competitors. There are even metrics for sales success based on reviews numbers – like getting 50 reviews per product within 3 months after the launch. If that metric is not reached then don’t expect your sales to take off too soon.
Bad practices have bad consequences and you can’t escape from them.
Competing on Amazon has become tougher and tougher every day. When one wants to sell at any cost and gets into the belief that buying fake reviews will help them achieve their goals, one should expect that the system around does not ignore their actions and will react.
Amazon reacts by deleting whatever their algorythms identify as fake reviews. And like any algorythms they also fail now and then and real, authentic reviews are deleted too.
That is the price that an entire community of Amazon sellers has to pay when part of it is trying to follow unfair practices. And here is where FeedCheck is going to help you soon by spotting deleted reviews so that you can take action and reclaim them.
Remember – never buy fake reviews! Amazon will delete them anyway and it might delete some authentic ones too.
Image source: http://vrzone.com/articles/amazon-caps-user-reviews/117771.html